Madison and his like-minded allies — the Pennsylvanians James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris, for example — favored a national popular vote to choose the president. Direct election by “the people” (for the most part, property-owning white men) would guarantee executive independence and filter for men of “distinguished character, or services.” On the other side were Southern delegates who thought a popular vote would put them on the losing side of presidential contests; the free population of the North was, of course, larger than the free population of the South. Still other delegates wanted the legislative option to prevail.
As the historian Alexander Keyssar explains in “Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?,” more than a few other ideas bubbled up over the course of that summer. Among them:
selection by the governors of the states or by state legislatures; election by a committee of fifteen legislators chosen by lot (and obliged to act as soon as they were chosen, to avoid intrigue); a popular election in which each voter cast ballots for two or three candidates, only one of whom could be from his own state: nomination of one candidate by the people of each state, with the winner to then be chosen by the national legislature.
As the convention came to a close, the exhausted delegates finally made a choice: Someone else would have to choose. They turned the issue over to a committee on “postponed parts.” That committee, in turn, tried to chart a path of least resistance through the options at hand. First, it adopted an idea — introduced during the summer of discussion — to have electors act as intermediaries between the public and the selection of the president. In a concession to supporters of legislative selection, those electors would gather in a purpose-made body to make their decision. In a nod to the concerns of Southern delegates, the distribution of electors would be based on representation in the House and Senate.
The committee made its recommendation and with one major modification — the House of Representatives, and not the Senate, would decide in the event that no candidate earned a majority — the convention accepted it. The delegates had no real sense of how the Electoral College would work in practice. More than a few thought that most elections would be decided by the House. And in any case, they also knew that however the people chose a president, their first choice would be George Washington. To both the framers and the ratifiers, the mechanism was less important than the man.
In the first presidential elections of the early American republic, the Electoral College worked mostly as designed. Some states held popular elections to choose electors, others had them selected by state legislatures. Electors cast their ballots for the man who would be president, Washington, and designated a candidate for vice president as well, John Adams (an effort that required some coordination since, until the ratification of the 12th Amendment, electors could not cast separate ballots for president and vice president). But with the full emergence of partisan politics during Washington’s second term, and his departure at its conclusion, state legislatures, essentially acting as partisan political organizations, tried to game the system.
“States,” Keyssar notes, “took advantage of the flexible constitutional architecture to switch procedures from one election to the next.” They would move from legislative selection of electors to a district-based vote to a winner-take-all election (called “the general ticket”) depending on which option was more likely to secure victory for the legislature’s favored candidate. Virginia, for example, switched from district elections to winner-take-all in 1800, to help Thomas Jefferson win the presidency.